Hillary Clinton Channels April Ludgate

I know I am not the only person to have found Hillary Clinton’s delivery of her Campaign Reset speech to have been weird. On social media I have seen her oddball cadences and peculiar emphesis labeled “wooden” or “stilted” and even robotic.

But she wasn’t robotic. I kept listening to her speak, and thinking, “what is this reminding me of?” And it eluded me, until — distracted by real life — I finally gave up thinking about it, but only until I saw this video out of the Rubio campaign, which highlighted precisely the part of Hillary’s speech that had nagged at me:

Weird, weird delivery. I knew I’d heard it somewhere before — a speech delivered in a manner so hucksterish, so contemptuous of the intelligence of the listener.

On twitter, I tried to puzzle it out:

Was she reminding me of W.C. Fields? No, that still wasn’t it, but I knew that old bamboozling con-artist was nearer to the mark.

Even so, Hillary’s delivery went beyond the theatrics of a phony carny barker. There seemed to be an unfamiliarity with the ideas, even as they were being presented; words spoken into the ether, unsupported by even the slightest breeze of sincerity, which might keep them aloft, which is why, splat, they fell so hard.

And then, suddenly, I got it: so much insincerity, rendered this weirdly, and offered for no other reason than the monetary prize offered to the winner?